La Antigua Guatemala Daily Photo

Signs: They come with all kinds messages; some with weird information too.

If you’ve been visiting La Antigua Guatemala Daily Photo for a month or longer, you will know that the sign category gets a lot of attention from my viewfinder. You can browse the sign category to see 48 samples of the different signs capture thus far.

Obviously, the sign above and the Hippies use backdoor sign, from a couple of days ago, make great decoration for the hippie hole that is Café No Sé. It adds a sort of branding to the joint where you can drink Ilegal Mezcal, add salt and pepper to your Cuban burritos from a Venado Aguardiente Añejo bottle.

Recycling is good.

In Guatemala we do a lot of recycling, not out of conscience, but rather out of necessity. We recycle retired school buses and turn them into colorful and powerful public transit buses known in derogatory terms as chicken buses. Some of these recycled buses have become mobile libraries or marimba orchestra buses. In other words, retired school buses from up north get to live a second life; a more productive life, down in the Guatemalan jungles and hi-lands.

The same goes for many retired vehicles from the rich north which are rodados (rolled) across the U.S., Mexico and Guatemala to live a second life. Rodados is the term used in Guatemala to designate old vehicles or crashed vehicles which were driven or towed all the way south into Guatemala.

The same goes for books, magazines, computers, and a very long et-cetera all the way to second or third hand clothes known as pacas for clothes that come in pallets.

If it wasn’t for all this recycling, sometimes, it feels like we are the big backyard dump for our neighbors from way up north; sort of a black hole where you can throw away all your trash, never to be seen again.

Out of sight, out of conscience!

Heck, sometimes we even do some local recycling too. For instance, all those empty hard liquor bottles can have a fulfilling second life as salt and pepper shakers.

What I like about the people of Café No Sé is that they know when they are onto something; at once they apply the Café No Sé branding, and just in case, they make sure it is registered. These are my kind of hippies!

For all those Guatemalan ex-pats out there in the world, what kind memories do you get from seeing these Venado bottles?

No, this is not the Stairway to heaven; gosh I am so full of clichés. Honest to god, I am devoid of original thoughts. Everything in my head is a reference or quote to something else. For instance, I see the number 9 and I can only think of Revolution 9 from The Beatles.

One important aspect to highlight about this series about the library is the fact that the guts of the library are contemporary industrial furnishing inside a colonial 16th century building and yet there is harmony between the anachronistic elements.

So it took us about a week to finally enter the Multimedia zone at the Compañía de Jesús Library, as Lessie suggested. Now I would be extremely happy if the film section had the complete works of Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock and Emir Kusturica for starters. Or better yet, I would be in film-heaven if they only had the 1001 movies you must see before you die. Sometimes I wish I was a Slacker.

We resume the library tour right where we left off last Thursday.

This corridor reading area is a nice place to catch up with the recent events while reading a local newspaper from the newspaper rack available on this same hallway, while drinking a cup of the best coffee in the world and receiving a bath of the morning sunshine. Wow for a few moments you might even forget you are in third-world country.

Computer stations are also available at the Compañía de Jesús Library in La Antigua Guatemala. Patsy mentioned that many people opt for the computer instead of grabbing the old-time-tested book. Well, the times are a-changing, you know and everyone needs help with a new system. If you don’t believe me, just take a look a the video clip below that show us how difficult it was for the book to get accepted as the new medium for holding texts.

See I am a geek at heart. I carry a Palm Tungsten with over 100 electronic books on it for all those times when I am forced to make the queues; and that happens often in Guatemala. So I carry all kinds of electronic books, many downloaded from the Proyect Gutenberg which I read with Palm Reader or Pluckr on the handy Palm. I have many more books on the computer in PDF and other formats. So I am not foreign to the new technologies. But I love real paperback books, hardcovers, off-white with rough border books. I especially like that no batteries are included for the book to work.

What is your opinion of books, electronic books, e-books, electronic book readers, the new Kindle reading device?

Post cards request update: Today a found several post cards sent by Ann from Montego Bay, Jamaica. Ann was kind enough to send several post cards to compensate for her tardiness, so she says. Ann maintains the very insightful and informative Montego Bay Daily Photo. Just like with books, as much as I take advantage of email, web sites, and blogs, I have a soft spot in may heart for actual really real post cards and letters, so please keep ‘em coming! If you don’t know what I am talking about, please do read the entry Postscript.

From the reception desk, we move to the reading area, immediately to the left, to check out all the recent magazines (mostly European and Spanish). This gray granite table with its bright illumination is the perfect work area to do your Spanish classes homework; even more so if you take into account the great dictionaries and thesaurus available there.

One more aspect which makes this library different from many libraries in Guatemala is the fact that it is self-served and thus you are free to walk around the whole library in search of the magnificent La casa de usted y otros viajes of Jorge Ibargüengoitia or the most recent novel by Javier Marías or better yet the most recently published Guatemalan literature book. The choice is yours once you are living your advertures inside this wonder-book-land.

Have I mentioned that the Christmas season just begun? If you feel like being Santa Claus this year, you can send your Christmas present by clicking the Amazon Wish List button below and picking something from the wish list. If you send something and you let me know who you are, I will send some printed 4×6 photos from this site back by regular mail. Whatever you send goes into a special kind of post office box in Miami and from there the package is shipped to Guatemala. I am still responsible for the shipping charges from Miami to Guatemala and the import duties and taxes.

We will begin a mini tour of the library at the Compañía de Jesús building under the care of Cooperación Española NGO or Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional as it is called in Spanish.

But first the disclosure: I love libraries; even chicken bus libraries!

Back when I lived in the good old U.S. of A. I met many people who used to brag about the numerous credit cards they had in their wallets. I just told them I only carried one card because to me it was enough. You can guess what card that was, right?

I have said several times that the Compañía de Jesús building is my favorite building in the whole universe (boy, I am beginning to sound like Manolo, ) and the main reason for that is the library inside.

There are only two libraries in La Antigua Guatemala that allow check outs (to take books home for those not fluent in library-speak) and the library at the Compañía de Jesús building is one of them. It is the biggest library as well. We will begin the tour at the reception desk, if it’s fine with you.

Here are the other reasons why I love the Compañía de Jesús building: the coffee bush hedge; the atrium and the people I found there 1, 2, 3, 4; the history on the plaques, the windows, the doorways, the garden and fountain, the window frames, the arches and the Spanish-style roof tiles just to name some aspects.

Another one bites the dust. Yes, a Subway franchise just opened its doors in La Antigua Guatemala. Transnationals, they all want a piece of the cake. The cake is made up from all the tourists who come an go through the rotating doors of the tourist capital of northern Central America: La Antigua Guatemala.

I think this Subway franchise will have to use its second slogan: The Way A Sandwich Should Be because the Eat fresh may not work in a place like Antigua Guatemala, where most places serve REAL fresh food. With all of these transnational fast-food restaurants in La Antigua Guatemala, we still have to make a run for the border or drive to Guatemala City if we’d like to think outside the bun to enjoy a bean and cheese burrito.

By the way, I’ve been told that a lunch for two at Subway can set you back 2.5 times the daily minimum Guatemalan wage which is Q40/US$8. That is 2.5 times more expensive than any freshly Guatemalan cuisine meal [for two] in the many daily menu restaurants in town.

It is so peaceful to walk on the tree-lined cobblestone street with benches on the side in your way in or out of the San Lázaro Cemetery. I guess a visit to this cemetery could be a much needed break from the ‘hectic’ strolls around La Antigua Guatemala.

I want to thank Sompopo, Patsy Poor and MarieMc for suggesting a visit to the cemetery. It is time to wave goodbye to our dead and continue to document the lives of the living.

It must be nice to know your resting place it’s taken care of by a family mausoleum. In the picture above you get a close-up view of the Solorzano Najera family mausoleum. Who are they? Who knows; a random pick by the viewfinder on the way out of the cemetery.

There is a broken bell in the San Lázaro Church, which is located inside the premises of the San Lázaro Cemetery. The broken bell serves as testament of the many earthquakes this land has experienced and its resilient will to continue to toll for the dead.

Does anyone care to translate the sign below the broken bell?

One aspect I forgot to mention was that there is full-size church inside the San Lazaro Cemetery in La Antigua Guatemala which I believe goes by the same name. There are some niches in the church façade, just like in many churches around Antigua Guatemala.

A few more photos and we will wave goodbye to the cemetery series. I hope you have enjoyed the the bird’s eye overview of the San Lázaro Cemetery.

This niche and the surrounding walls was basically the only color I found at the San Lázaro Cemetery. This piece was between two sets of above-ground crypts; the set on the right was empty and the set on the left was not vacant.

Perhaps it is not too late to introduce some of the wonderful Antigüeño color palette into the La Antigua Guatemala’s main public cemetery.

The cross is another element that repeats itself often in the cemetery. Actually, the cross is an element omnipresent throughout La Antigua Guatemala.